Question e-mailed by Edsel Ocson, May 7, 2014:I hope you still accept inquiries from readers.
I read recently in one of the Manila broadsheets the following sentence:
“I remember a memorable experience, in the 1970s, with my paternal grandmother, a feisty devout Buddhist living in Davao WHO I FREQUENTLY VISITED.” (capitalization mine)
Is the use of “who” in the above sentence correct or acceptable? Or should “whom” be used instead?
Thank you for your attention.
My reply to Edsel Ocson:Yes, of course, I continue to accept inquiries about English grammar from readers of my column in
The Manila Times and from members and visitors of Jose Carillo’s English Forum online. Questions are most welcome in both and I make every effort to answer them as fast as I can. But when a question is sent to me by e-mail, it tends to get swamped by other e-mails in my mailbox and I’m unable to attend to it quickly enough. This is precisely what happened to your very interesting question, which got into my mailbox last May 7 yet. For a faster response from me, I suggest that you either post your questions directly in the responses section of my column in the
Times or in a Forum discussion board of your choice. If you wish to keep your inquiry private, however, you can post it in my Personal Messages box in the Forum.
Now to your question: Is the use of “who” in the sentence below that you presented correct or acceptable, or should “whom” be used instead?
“I remember a memorable experience, in the 1970s, with my paternal grandmother, a feisty devout Buddhist living in Davao
who I frequently visited.”
Offhand, I must tell you that prescriptive grammarians condemn the use of the subjective “who” in that construction and would demand adamantly that it be replaced with the objective “whom.” Personally, though, I find that replacement ill-advised because the resulting sentence would sound too formal, stilted, and stuffy: “I remember a memorable experience, in the 1970s, with my paternal grandmother, a feisty devout Buddhist living in Davao
whom I frequently visited.” I’d rather that the sentence retain “who” to keep that sentence natural-sounding and pleasantly informal the way the writer of the narrative obviously intended it to be. Better still, just to avoid getting into heated arguments over the use of “who” or “whom” in that sentence, I’d seriously consider replacing “who” with “that,” as follows: “I remember a memorable experience, in the 1970s, with my paternal grandmother, a feisty devout Buddhist living in Davao
that I frequently visited.” I’d even go to the extent of rewording the sentence to get rid of “who” and “whom” and of “that” altogether while retaining the sense and tonality intended by the original sentence, as in this rewrite: “I remember a memorable experience, in the 1970s, with my paternal grandmother, a feisty devout Buddhist I frequently visited in Davao.” (The aspect of the subject’s “living” in Davao is lost in the reconstruction, of course, but I think it’s a small price to pay for avoiding the “who” vs. “whom” debate and nicely streamlining the sentence as well.)
Why should we go to such lengths when presented with the choice between “who” and “whom” or taking recourse to “that” for such sentence constructions? It’s because aside from being highly debatable, using either “who” or “whom” is often too problematic from both the style and language register standpoints. The grammatically unassailable “whom,” which is the true objective-case form of “who,” just doesn’t sound right to the modern ear; in many cases, in fact, “whom” imbues an unwanted pedantic, standoffish academic tone to what should be an informal, conversational statement. On the other hand, using “who” instead gives both the writer and the reader the uncomfortable feeling that something’s not right with the sentence.
As I write this, a
Harvard Magazine mailer landed on my mailbox with this very timely advertorial question from the Harvard Medical School: “Whom Will You Honor This Mother’s Day?” That interrogative construction is actually one of the “whom” usages that I can tolerate without being overpowered by the itch to change it to “who,” but frankly, I’d be more comfortable and at peace with that message if it had used “who” in the first place: “Who Will You Honor This Mother’s Day?”
Anyway, to round off my feelings about the “who” vs. “whom” conundrum, let me share with you my posting in the Forum way back in November 2009 in response to a Forum member’s question similar to yours (
“Usage of infinitives and of “who vs. whom”):
It’s not so much that the relative pronoun “whom” is often incorrectly used as that people tend to wrongly use “who” in place of it, and this misuse has got nothing to do with modern usage. The problem is that “whom” sentence constructions tend to sound too stiff and formal, as in “The salesman whom we hired for the new product is doing a terrific job.” The relative pronoun “whom” is, of course, the objective form of “who,” and is being used in that sentence to introduce a relative clause that’s functioning as the direct object of the operative verb “hired.” What happens is that because of their discomfort with using “whom,” many people prefer to wrongly use the subjective pronoun “who” instead for such sentence constructions: “The salesman who we hired for the new product is doing a terrific job.” This misuse may be colloquially acceptable but strict grammarians continue to frown on it, so it’s highly advisable to avoid it in formal and academic writing.
Other than total reconstruction, there are actually two ways of avoiding “whom” in such sentences. One is, whenever semantically possible, to drop the relative pronoun altogether, as in this elliptical construction: “The salesman we hired for the new product is doing a terrific job.” The other is to use the relative pronoun “that” instead: “The salesman that we hired for the new product is doing a terrific job.” But conventional grammarians would object to this usage as well and insist that “that” should be limited to nonhuman antecedent nouns.
Personally, I wouldn’t hesitate to use “that” in such cases. After all, it turns out that early English actually used words related to “that” to mark relative clauses, and used “who” and “whom” only as question words and as indefinite pronouns in such constructions as “I wonder who were at the hunt.” Indeed, it was only because of the strong influence of Latin on written English in the 1800s that the contemporary use of “who” and “whom” as relative pronouns became the mark of educated people. This time, however, many native English speakers are rediscovering the grammatical virtues and simplicity of “that” as an all-purpose relative pronoun. I do think that even nonnative English speakers now can follow suit with little danger of being marked as uneducated yokels.
That said, I’m referring you to the usage guides for “who” and “whom” provided by the
American Heritage Dictionary and
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary. They are unanimous in their assessment of “whom” as a highly problematic personal pronoun, and they provide numerous techniques for avoiding its use or—at the very least—for using it in undebatable reconstructions that don’t alter the statement's intended tonality or language register.
Read the usage note for “who” and “whom” by the American Heritage Dictionary now!Read the usage guide for “who” and “whom” by Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary now!
